First Dates

I’ve been baking a lot of disappointing cookies and using a lot of successful thyme, which might be the most underrated of the cardinal herbs. If baking is a laborious long-term investment, then cooking various meats from the factory farm––quartered, boneless, ground––is the dashiest of instant gratifications.

If you wear a mask 100% of the time these days, you’re temporarily absolved of other sins of unsustainability, having shown the most basic concern. (The absolution lasts just as long as other cheap superiority highs.)

And people who journal are 50% happier, I think it is, though I’ve been hearing a lot about paying special attention to sample diversity and size, plus replicability. But there’s something intuitive, if unscientific, about the logic of it: you see your days as amounting to more than just an angry, featureless blur if you have a record of the accumulating small efforts. I’ve been watching the show How To With John Wilson––he has a short entry for every day, a meticulous grid, and it can’t be a coincidence he’s mastered the art of making a show about nothing out of everything. As my librarian friend Michelle says: “It’s all about one’s well-cataloged b-roll. Beneath every successful happiness is a voluminous archive.” Or, the closest thing to happiness is organized unhappiness.

Hence the note about cookies and thyme.

To be more specific: On Friday, December 11th I made chicken thighs with lemon, garlic, onions, olives, and many dashes of thyme, too late to be consumed.

I consumed it anyway. I ate quickly, as I learned to in childhood, as I practiced with Jacob.

I packed away the heap of leftover food. I am out of practice cooking for one.

On Saturday, December 12th I finally fell asleep at 3:30am. The sun rose at 7:12, shone through useless venetian blinds, and brightened my eyelids until I woke at 8:45. I ground Stumptown beans (Hair Bender), boiled water in a Le Creuset Kettle (a wedding gift), and walked the railroad of rooms, waiting. Michelle told me recently I only fully animate after I drink coffee and I’ve never minded an addiction less. I ran at the sound of the whistle and stubbed my toe badly on a misplaced door. I prematurely animated.

I read a piece in the New Yorker about how imagining alternate, unlived lives shapes people’s identities. It was elitist (pre-med or pre-law offered up as a quintessentially modern life choice), and also quite moving.

I am currently in an imagined alternate, waiting for it to be lived.

––

I bathed with a jasmine bath bomb (some brand called “scotin” from Amazon––see: absolution, petering out); the water turned a chlorinated blue. I bought two sticks of salted butter and twelve ounces of Ghirardelli chocolate chips from the corner store and made cookies to take to a date with Matt from the Wall Street Journal. I’ve taken to having a treat with me on dates, an offering. They never flattened and were more like muffins, so Matt would have to learn early to love my imperfect but accumulating, well-cataloged small efforts.

––

I’ve been thinking about if there had been no pandemic and instead of meeting the unhinged number of men I’ve been meeting for cold, mostly-masked, carefully calibrated dates, I was actually having uncareful sex with all of them. One after the other. This week, so far, I have Matt from the Wall Street Journal Saturday, Patrick from Sotheby’s Sunday, Paul from Facebook Monday. Sex, sex, sex, back-to-back. I don’t think I’d have wanted that before. It’s not that I’m any less of a pretentious prude with vanilla sexual tastes that drive away even the most loyal devotee of my averagely defined, pockmarked body. It’s these scintillating limitations we’re all acknowledging at every turn––they put the forbidden fruit in such starker relief.

Of course it’s your penis I’m after. And the look in your eye when I grab it. And whether you manage to smile (or laugh!) as we navigate with hopeful pleasure the other parts of ourselves we can no longer blithely touch; and your deep inhale as your head rests happily on my chest, filled with thoughts of all the wonderful things we could do with the time stretching forth from this happy, still, naked moment (imagining the mutual imagining of sex being perhaps the most vanilla of all my imaginings). With Matt, Patrick, and Paul––like the Lou Reed song, I’ve got my own satellite of love going, all week long.

Suffice it to say I’m no longer offended by the Top and Bottom arrows on all of these dating profiles––a definitive ↓ makes it a lot harder to picture the look in his eye when he gathers his wandering wits and finally, tenderly presses inside me.

––

I’m late to my date with Matt because I thought it would be easier to find street parking and spend ten minutes circling the Upper East Side. I’m late because I commit small acts of self-sabotage. And I commit larger acts of self-sabotage, like texting at red lights, because I’m late. Much causality can revolve around being late.

Matt: So I’m in a car on the way to the Met now, but question…should we maybe do it another day? Or do it quickly then go outside? It is just SO insanely nice out. I’m not trying to bail or anything and am actually on the way… it’s just crazy nice out.

It’s important to note that at this point the light was still red. And perhaps, too, my particular sensitivity to “bailing.”

Me: Hey! Sorry, I didn’t see this. Let’s do it quickly then go outside? Like an hour? I’m here by the way, just looking for parking.

I’m late because I can’t easily measure time or distance. What is reasonable to fit into a day? Bathing, making muffin-cookies, cleaning up the dishes and the counters. Chatting with your eighty-year-old landlady Mrs. Borek while she yanks around oversized draw-string trash bags and then going for a stroll to the river, lazily reading some new piece by Jill Lepore about the history of presidential archives––can you still arrive at the Met at one in the afternoon with enough time to park? How far in advance do you need to plan it? “There’s plenty to do under the sun,” my grandma Lotte would say, no matter the circumstance. She died in 2013, seven years ago, at eighty-seven. I often wonder what she would say in these circumstances.

Matt: Ok no rush.

Matt: I’m sitting by the steps drinking a coffee.

Matt: And eating a brownie for breakfast lol

Matt: I brought you one

Me: aw thanks, no way. I brought cookies

Matt: B4C

Matt: I joined a line

Matt: I don’t know what line

Matt: But it’s a line

Me: Haha okay! I should have known this was going to be impossible.

Matt: Have you parked yet?

Me: Nope but I can feel myself getting closer to lucky.

I settled on a fifty-dollar lot, feeling like the house had won, thinking of my life as a series of gambles––on Jacob, on New York City, on parking, on these dates now, my bets low stakes again. Thinking of Jacob, always, of his father’s working walks around the MGM Grand night after night, looking for a fixture to fix, and the insider’s tour of the casino he gave us just last December. The family would be gathering soon for Christmas, the first without me in six years.

The game-faced parking attendant, a croupier secluded in casino-like fluorescence, handed me my ticket without a word.

Matt: Ah ok

Matt: I’ll leave the line then

Matt: It’s moving quickly

Me: Ok I picked a lot

Me: See you soon

I ran with my backpack thumping against my spine, before yanking the straps so tight that later I’d have to fight to detach from it in another show of excessive effort. Maybe I’d look nice and ruddy on arrival, I thought, swerving into the street to avoid an advancing squad line of couples on the sidewalk. My stubbed toe throbbed. A man my age pulling out of his comfortable spot on Eighty-third Street stopped short when I passed him on the left. I could feel his eyes on the back of my head.

Jacob said I was always running with a backpack on. He would imitate me by sprinting around our apartment holding his armpits.

Me: What’re you wearing

Matt looked up from his brownie and I could see that his hair, at least, and his general build, were what I expected. His slim fit denim tapered to a pointy black shoe. His mask was plain––black, too. The sun shone pleasantly on us. We both went in for a hug, an early indication of interest, having passed some first test of apparent appeal.

“You made it,” he said.

“I’m so sorry I’m late.”

“No, don’t be, it gave me time to wonder if you were standing me up,” he said.

“Never! And you’re the one who wavered. We don’t have to go in, by the way.”

“No, I don’t know what my problem was, it’s a fine day for the Met.”

I had no sense of his face. For all the literary attention paid to the eyes, they apparently have nothing to do with how a person looks. I might as well be first introduced to your hand, the way it fidgets or sits still.

I unglued myself from my pack to bring out the tin of cookies I’d brought and by the time I looked back, he’d revealed his defining features, the deep dimples and wide mouth. So, I showed him mine (his to articulate). He didn’t ask before unmasking, which was a minor confession of character––not good or bad yet, just evidence. We both seemed happy enough with the reveal.

“I’m new to baking,” I said. “So be kind.”

“Well, I’m easy to please.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“I didn’t make this,” he said, breaking off a bit of his brownie for me, “but I’m doing a heck of a job eating it.”

We chewed our respective sweets and I wondered at the wisdom of starting a date on a sugar high. I would be sure to stop short of any monologuing, I told myself, and––reminder––would not mention Jacob. I’d made that mistake a few times already, on previous dates in September, October, and November. Quite a few times.

“Did you finish off that raspberry jam as quickly?” I asked, remembering some of the contents of our three-week-old text thread, including his new hobby.

“Oh, nope! Shoot, I should have brought you some. And you should have brought me some of that…was it…pot pie?” I nodded. “Not so new to baking.”

“I had to freeze three quarters of it. Turns out an entire pot pie is not the right serving for a one-person Thanksgiving.” There I was, already dangerously close to mentioning Jacob.

“Shall we join the line? Excuse me”––I motioned to a woman standing on a blue STAND HERE circle that already looked faded and anachronistic, like we were closing in on a long-running children’s show, puppets or a musical––“Are you in line?”

She wasn’t, so we walked further up, into the shade of the museum, a Flüggeian six feet from anyone but each other, the newest bubble on the block.

It was busier than I expected, but we managed to purchase tickets quickly and then returned to the center of the Great Hall. I had suggested the museum visit as a chance to see Kent Monkman’s paintings, which were brought to my attention over text by Patrick from Sotheby’s––the following day’s date––who said they reimagined American colonialism through a queer, native lens, a useful copy-paste. I wasn’t sure if there was something dishonest about using the interests of one prospect as the basis for a first date with another, but I told myself it was a new sort of integration I was trying out, letting all these transients bleed into each other.

The Monkman paintings weren’t hard to find, they flanked the entrance of the Great Hall. I was surprised by their size and placement and immediately grateful to Patrick for the idea; the trip was already worth it for that initial impression of scale and accomplishment, two things in recent short supply. I could have come alone and collected private thoughts about the paintings’ scenes and figures, but instead I had invited Matt, so we stood close to each other, sharing our commentary as it arose out of the sides of our mouths, desultory but with the intent to further reveal ourselves. In Monkman’s Resurgence of the People, Matt noted the comparison to Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, and in Welcoming the Newcomers he found less obvious references I didn’t recognize, like Venus and Adonis. I noted the presiding stoicism of the protagonist compared to the expressions of agony and ecstasy surrounding them––Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, the caption told us the recurring figure was called.

“Mischief Egotistical,” I said, to which Matt raised his eyebrows high in a useful show of masked appreciation (the brow, even, proving more expressive than its subject). I was glad I hadn’t read anything about Monkman before arriving.

“I strive for that sort of stoicism,” I said as we walked back to the center of the Hall, giving into the habit of pontificating about myself.

“Really? You seem pretty excitable.”

“Well, exactly,” I said. He smiled, his dimples creasing his face, making him look young and pliable.

“You don’t want to lean into that?”

“Aren’t all the most honorable people stoic?” I asked. Repeating it, I remembered that Jacob was interested in Stoicism a couple years ago, that he’d said it was actually much more about reason and reflection than withholding emotion. It was hard to explain, he’d said with a wave of his hand. I think I joked it was just about living in the moment.

“You have to have something to overcome to be stoic,” Matt replied. “If you’re stoic and privileged you’re just…a bore.” Matt, too, seemed like a pontificator. Did the Met bring out the hypotheses in its visitors, or bring the hypothesizers to visit? There was an experimental quality to these halls, to all the evidence of people’s endless appetite for expressive endeavors.

I grabbed a map, ready for a trip down one of their B.C. worlds. “Pick a place,” I said, suddenly desiring a definitiveness to my travels, and unwilling to offer it myself. He chose Egypt, so we found our wing and made our way through rooms filled with grandeur and intricacy that alternated with vertiginous frequency. From statues of sphinxes and gods to ornaments of falcons and scarabs we shifted our attention, by turns like ornaments or gods ourselves. “Do you prefer the large and imposing or the small and endearing,” I asked him in a hushed tone as we moved past a series of animal figurines. We came before the Necklace of Sithathoryunet with the Name of Senwosret II. He clasped his hands behind his back in a relaxed, professorial way that I imitated out of flattery. “I wouldn’t have known coming in, but I think I favor the bibelots today,” he said.

“Bibelot?” I said, taken aback.

“Yeah, you know, a bauble, a trinket. I came armed with some choice vocabulary, given your interest,” he said, with a teasing nudge of his elbow. He was referencing my Hinge profile, my vocabulary being one of the things I listed as “taking pride in.” That and my occasional cooking and long-distance friendships. I tried to remember his prompts and responses. Nothing as objectionable, I can say for sure, as needing a partner who “doesn’t take himself too seriously” or jokingly championing “people walking faster on the sidewalk” as a social cause. I remembered something about Settlers of Catan, though hopefully not following “I’m overly competitive about.”

“The pharaohs are great and all, but look at this,” he said, bringing my attention back to the necklace, made of feldspar and chalcedony and garnet and carnelian, all words I’d never be able to pluck from memory. “Three hundred and seventy-two stones, carved into the tiniest interlocking pieces. And utterly symmetrical.”

“All in honor of…Senwosret,” I said. “It seems unfair that the names we can decipher are the gods and kings, but the makers are anonymous.”

He said there was a lot that was unfair about the exhibit, asking what I thought of the ethics of American and English archeologists looting Egypt of its ancient history in the early twentieth century, and whether the rightful place for all of this art was back where it originated. I could feel my cheeks getting warm, these questions caught me off guard. They also seemed perfectly timed with our arrival at the Temple of Dendur in the glass-encased Sackler Wing, as if we’d come to the inevitable and many-faceted morals of the Met portion of our visit, the light flooding in to lay bare any number of hypocrisies and failures, hopefully not our own. Through a series of uncertain pivots––my head tilting to and fro with each improvised attempt at theories of appropriation––I managed to eventually land us back in the imagined world of the exhibit’s subjects. I wondered aloud how knowledge on the collective and individual level in Egypt’s Middle Kingdom compared to knowledge in our own society. I was tugging at that threadbare idea: that a dedicated, scientific few did the knowledge work, raising the tide for everyone over centuries, while the expertise of the masses––who still found more meaning in God than in matter and energy––remained flat. I was rambling. Monologuing, as I told myself I wouldn’t. I blamed the sugar.

He looked incredulous, his wide, pulled-back mouth clearly practiced at smirking, like it was settling into its usual mold. I imagined an office of smirkers at the Journal.

He poked holes in my argument on two fronts, asking if I considered myself part of the scientific few or the benighted masses––exposing my own elitist, false dichotomies, the sort I’d frowned upon earlier that day. And didn’t increased specialization also increase the expertise of the tradesman, the artisan, the merchant, the professional?

We were passing an elaborate funerary model of an ancient Egyptian bakery and brewery, filled with small, wooden figurines probably carved by some of the same hands that did the work depicted. So I countered with how our self-sufficiency had decreased as the tools at our disposal grew more sophisticated, thinking about my stupid cookies, and my substantial ignorance in the ways of milling and leavening. Still, the smirk mold. I’d lost the dimples for now, but at least he let out a soft, short hum, a signal of agreement or desire to move on.

––

Leaving the museum, I felt sustained by observation and aroused by the elbow nudges and other glancing physical touches that had punctuated our easy indoor rapport. We hadn’t talked about our jobs and other biographic details, an indication of the merits of meeting someone in an environment where subjects of discussion present themselves to you like dishes on a conveyor belt, or maybe an indication that Matt was a good fit, regardless of the smirking or how neatly our demographics might align.

We decided to eat outdoors at a nearby diner called Nectar where the waiters dressed in uniform. Matt had a confidence that I appreciated in contrast to Jacob, the kind that allowed him to interrupt our review of the menu to compliment the goldendoodle sitting on a chair next to its owner––like two ladies lunching––at a table across the sidewalk. I thought we’d shared a look that affirmed our mutual disdain for the sort of performative dog ownership on display here, but then he engaged with the performer, so I must have misjudged the eye contact. Their exchange followed a loud and familiar succession of age? breed? and reminiscence. He didn’t mind who around us heard about his childhood dog’s recent death, in fact didn’t seem to be telling anyone in particular as he looked not at her or at me but perhaps at some dust particles floating in a ray of light that had sneakily found its way through the vertical geometry of Madison Avenue to land at our table.

A memory of one of my early dates with Jacob emerged, one of the first days I’d spent time with his friends––a cold car trip to Dead Horse Bay, three of us in the back seat when he got a text from his mom saying that Stacy had died, apparently his favorite hometown companion, a dog. I think I said something less than comforting, attempting some clever bit of commentary about dogs’ relationships to their owners, so the memory elicited a squinting regret that I blinked away before corralling Matt’s directionless thought into a brief discussion of our childhoods. We were both from different parts of Maryland, both Jewish, both the younger sibling, and in finding these intersections we recounted a few formative experiences that were well-worn to the point of sounding rehearsed, though we stopped short of our coming out stories, more frequently a facet of the tipsy evening date, I’d found. His parents had recently gotten over Covid; he and his sister had gone down to offer help. His grandparents had lived in a house in Bethesda on a street I knew, but his memories of the place were hazy and mostly involved driving up to it and then, later, driving away.

I knew what he meant, the car seat being the fulcrum of anticipation and drowsiness from which the rest of those far-off days unfolded and eventually returned. I told him about Lotte, how a photograph of her and my grandpa Harold standing at their narrow front door, waving through the crape myrtle as we drove away, practically flits with the rustle of pink blossoms, the picture filling in for what’s left of the memory itself––a lulling motion underfoot, a familiar gesture seen through faltering eyelids. By tossing or deleting all of my pictures with Jacob, I realized, I was hoping that those memories, too, would be reduced to no more than a little turbulence and an obstructed goodbye.

We finally talked about our jobs, cherry-picking the most elevating projects. When he described his aspiration to leave behind the burgeoning world of audio journalism and create some kind of investment app, my interest in him didn’t dim so much as lose its luster, like a glittery filter faded away, though I can only imagine how he felt listening to the most heartfelt description of bookselling that I could muster. We finished lunch and walked to the fifty-dollar lot, by that time discussing Facebook and its failure to create consistent rules on hate speech, and also the fallacy of first amendment arguments when it comes to such companies. I didn’t know much about Section 230, so he quickly pulled up a video he’d worked on that outlined its effects, which I watched intently on his phone. He stopped me at one point from walking into the street. He didn’t know that the first amendment only applied to government censorship, so I performed some constitutional fluency, trying to show him I could walk and talk at the same time, without needing his quick-thinking arm to once again intervene.

––

In the spirit of extending any good experience for as long as I possibly can, and often past its expiration, I offered to drive Matt home to Brooklyn. He seemed surprised at the concept but accepted, which suggested he wasn’t one of those men so insistent on their independence that they avoid convenience and generosity in its name. On the way down the FDR we passed a loud mess of police cars racing in the opposite direction and considered the horrors that could have necessitated such an obscene showing––they just kept coming.

The rest of the trip is hard to remember because I developed such an urgent, writhing need to pee that I was nearly unable to drive and Matt was forced to calm me with soothing words of reassurance. As I could have predicted, the drive was a touch too much. I survived, parking in front of a hydrant and racing up his building’s stairs to use his restroom––a courtesy I had no choice but to assume he was offering. But I held my breath while I peed, so it’s like I wasn’t even there. Thankfully the sweet relief of this primal urge far outshone the shame of displaying such childish control of my bodily functions, and I left for home––after briefly admiring his wood-paneled place––without a kiss, with nothing but the purest sense of having skirted disaster.

––

On the evening of Saturday, December 12th I bought new spices from the corner store with which I have little experience: paprika, cumin, and turmeric. With them I made more chicken thighs with raisins, garlic, onions, and mint. Plus, a stick of cinnamon. Leftovers would begin to pile up in the refrigerator.

On five-and-a-half hours of sleep, I tried again with the cookies. Friends had been telling me that you have to bang the pan against the side of the oven, and hard. This seemed ridiculous, disruptive, and loud, but I did it anyway this time and watched the dough I’d been sure was too wet and sticky collapse like a sigh of defeat.

Again there were dishes to wash and counters to clean. “There’s nothing new under the sun,” grandma Lotte would say. In the living room my plastic, portable file cabinet sat on the rug, the Important Pictures folder open next to it, picked clean of almost everything since 2014, six years stuffed in a trash bag waiting to go out. What was left? A lot of very important grandma Lotte, so the memory of our bond would have to expand to fill the empty filing space. I used to say that I wish they could have met, Jacob and Lotte––how she would have loved him, what a tragic trick of fate, just a year too late. I couldn’t take it back.

Open on the kitchen table was the Lepore piece about presidential archives, The Trump Papers. Or as Michelle the librarian called it, An Archival Horror Show. She would know. I ran my fingers over a starchy quote from FDR about how bringing together the records of the past requires that you believe in the past, in a capacity to learn from it and gain judgments in creating the future.

If I was a country, I would be closed, repressive, a model of mercurial record-keeping, suppressing what was unflattering and bringing the rest to the fore. My archive started now, a catalog curated with one purpose in mind, and it wasn’t truth or reconciliation.

I took out the trash. The sun had set at 4:29 and Mrs. Borek was nowhere to be found. I bathed with an orange bath bomb; the water turned a sickly yellow. My phone rested on the lip of the tub, and I grabbed it to text Patrick from Sotheby’s about our plan for Sunday, December 13th at one in the afternoon.